D&D General [rant]The conservatism of D&D fans is exhausting.

[EzekielRaiden]

This is conflating ideas. We're talking about an unrelated or distantly related skill roll determining that something bad will or will not happen. We are not saying that a party being stealthy as they travel might not be able to avoid some encounters through that skill.

And being stealthy when you pick a lock is thus definitely never relevant whatsoever, no matter what, under any circumstances?

Pull the other one.

 

[pemerton]

Nope. Cook is not implicit in a kitchen at 2am

I don't recall 2 am being a feature of the example set out in the blog:

It’s classic roll playing, you’re at a house, the door is locked, and as the rogue, you’re rolling to pick the lock. You roll the die and don’t get enough to unlock the door. You ask the Dungeon Master, “Can I try again?”. They respond that no one is coming, so sure, roll again. Three more times you roll and eventually get it and you guys get into the house safely.

Why were you rolling the die?

If nothing bad was going to happen, there was no reason for you to roll the die there. You aren’t in character spending time rolling the die over and over and over again. I’m guilty of this as a DM sometimes, not having any real pressure on the players while they make the die roll. So there has to be a better way to make the die rolls matter.

How do you do that?

There are two ways that you can do this. The first is immediate consequence. To stay with my previous example, you roll the die, you fail, the guards patrolling the estate or the town come across you and now you’re either running from the guards or you’re fighting them. It gives a threat of real punishment for what has happened and for failing the roll. It’s very straight forward.

But what if there’s an important map that the characters know for a fact is in that estate. They run away, they come back the next night, they fail again, they run away, they come back the next night, and the cycle continues and it gets pretty boring. We want to avoid that bit of boring in our role playing games.

So the other option is to, as the title suggests, fail forward.

What does that even mean?

Failing forward is the idea that you still get to unlock the door on a failed roll, but it comes at a cost. So you get into the house, but you startle a cook who screams. Now your plan of sneaking around the house slowly and avoiding all the guards is shot. You’re in the house, so you better use your opportunity, but this is going to be more of a smash and grab than a cat burglary.

Failing forward is a great concept to use because it can create a lot of interesting situations. In my example with the cook, do you kill the innocent cook who was just at the wrong place at the wrong time, because the cook screaming means the damage is done already. But I’ve also managed to keep the story moving forward. Instead of trying the same thing over and over again either without consequence or on different days and the game gets stuck in a rut, now things are moving quickly. In fact, by failing forward and having the cook scream, things have to go even faster and the players need to be even more creative.​

Not only is there no reference to it being 2 am, but there is no reference to the cook being "conjured" nor to the cook being in the middle of anything- rather, they are (aptly, and simply) described as being in the wrong place at the wrong time. Which is as @hawkeyefan and I have been describing it.

But anyway, even if it is 2 am, I don't feel the force of this at all. I mean, sometimes I'm in my kitchen at 2 am, and I live in relatively small household of 4 people and have a regular white-collar day job. In a pseudo-mediaeval world, a cook sleeping or working or whatever in the kitchen in the middle of the night seems unremarkable to me.

Of course, if a particular GM thinks it's silly, than they - presumably - won't say it.

"The GM could choose to narrate things that don't make sense." This is the problem this tread has been all about. They cannot honestly make this choice in trad task resolution.

Of course they can. I've seen it happen in real life.

"But why would they do so?" Because the system require them to come up with something dramatic to push the story forward. "Why would a GM instead not try to come up with sensible events?" Who said they didn't try? In the heat of the moment it is hard to solve the puzzle of comming up with something that is both really dramatic and fully sensible in light of complicated and subtle relations like comparing with what you would have narrated on success.

many of us GMs might want to avoid using techniques that needs to be handled with care, as they allow and temp/push (but not force) the us to narrate incoherent fiction. I think that seem like an entirely sensible thing to do for someone taking on a role with a lot of things to handle already, to not complicate the job even more

This has been done in a couple of seconds.

It doesn't have to be done in a couple of seconds. Nothing prevents the GM thinking. A common technique is to shift the action at the cliff-hanger moment to another character, precisely to give some time for the cliff-hanger situation to sit there for a bit and generate ideas.

Not to mention: in a game that is using "fail forward" resolution, the GM will typically (if they are following the game rules and heuristics) have already established a trajectory of threats and possibilities, which - as John Harper explains here - are what the GM then draws on to bring home an adverse consequence.

It can take a while to get good at this. Eero Tuovinen wrote about this here:

The player’s task in these games is simple advocacy, which is not difficult once you have a firm character. (Chargen is a key consideration in these games, compare them to see how different approaches work.) The GM might have more difficulty, as he needs to be able to reference the backstory, determine complications to introduce into the game, and figure out consequences. Much of the rules systems in these games address these challenges, and in addition the GM might have methodical tools outside the rules, such as pre-prepared relationship maps (helps with backstory), bangs (helps with provoking thematic choice) and pure experience (helps with determining consequences).​

Ultimately, a GM who isn't good at this sort of thing will not be able to GM a "fail forward" game well. This would be similar to how I'm not a very good GM of classic dungeon crawls, because I lack the necessary patience.

This is not about scene framing, it is and has always been about the kitchen being empty on success and the GM creating a fully new previously unestablished NPC in the kitchen in the middle of an activity on failure.

as in the example people have a problem with the kitchen is described as explicitly empty on success.

Which example are you talking about? Not the one from the blog, which says nothing about what would have been narrated on a success, nor anything about whether the NPC is previously established, nor anything about the cook being in the middle of some activity. In fact, to me the example seems to take it as obvious that the cook is implicit in the established situation.

But anyway, setting aside the example in the blog and turning to the example you are focused on, you are positing that the GM has made the following decision: if the roll succeeds, I narrate an empty kitchen; if the roll fails, I narrate a kitchen with a startled cook in the midst of making scones. Obviously, this is not a GM using map-and-key adjudication, nor using a heuristic that seeks to model one.

This is precisely the GM deciding that they will frame one scene on a success, and a different one on a failure. You may not care for it, but it is clearly a decision about what scene to frame: on a success, the GM chooses to frame a scene in which no cook is present.

Here's an analogue from actual play, that I posted somewhere upthread in the past few days:

the PCs had been teleported deep into the dungeon by a Crypt Thing (mechanically, when the PCs confronted the Crypt Thing the Doom Pool had grown to 2d12 and so I spent it to end the scene), and all were subject to a Lost in the Dungeon complication. As they wandered the dungeon looking for a way out, I described them coming into a large room with weird runes/carvings on the wall. One of the players (as his PC) guessed that these carvings might show a way out of the dungeon, and made a check to reduce/eliminate the complication. The check succeeded, and this established that his guess was correct. (Had it failed, some further complication might have been inflicted, or maybe the carvings were really a Symbol of Hopelessness, and the complication could have been stepped up to a level that renders the PC incapacitated.)

I described the weird marks on the wall, but I did not, and did not need to, think about what they might mean. That was resolved by the player declaring an action to read them, to see if his (and his PC's hope) that they might show a way out was correct. The roll succeeded, and thus (in the fiction) the PC correctly deciphered the clue in the carvings about how to get out of the dungeon and (at the table, in mechanical terms) the complication Lost in the Dungeon was eliminated.

What this example, and the cook example I describe just above, take advantage of is that human beings have the ability to create interesting fiction spontaneously. Including about who is in the kitchen or what the strange runes say. And it is possible to build a game in which the fiction that gets created is shaped by its creator in ways that fulfil, or dash, the hopes other participants in the game have for what the fiction will be. And it is possible to build a game, like the one described in the previous sentence, where the participant's hope is personified, in the fiction, as the hope of a particular character who finds themself in the imagined situation, in respect of which the hopes for how it will work out are arising. And where the determination as to whether they win or lose, in respect of this hope, is determined by rolling dice.

The game I've just worked out in the previous paragraph will be a RPG. It will have some similarities to other RPGs, and some differences. It may draw on prep to a great degree, a modest degree, or (as my Cortex+ Heroic Fantasy hack did) almost no prep at all. The way any prep is drawn on to shape narration can be quite different too, from RPG to RPG.

If you assume that questions of who is in the kitchen or what the runes say, by their nature, should be answered in prep (or by an improv GM making a decision that emulates the function of prep), then of course you will reject some RPGing that makes different assumptions about what should be, or needs to be, prepped. But there is no normative basis I can see for the assumption that any sort of fiction should be prepped. Different games do this differently. In the past 10 years I've GMed a dozen or more different RPGs, nearly all of which take different approaches to prep. In my Torchbearer 2e game, strange runes were handled completely differently, because the game assumes a higher degree of prep-based GM authority over backstory:

Climbing the stairs required a Dungeoneering test - Golin made the test, helped by his cousin Aldric and by Fea-bella Scouting ahead, and using his rope as gear. This was successful, and they came to the top of the stairs despite the snow and Golin's lack of tools.

While climbing the stairs, the PCs noticed some lint caught on an outcrop of rock. Fea-bella examined it, and a Beginner's Luck Peasant test was rolled. This failed: so Fea-bella recognised that the lint was from the breeches of an Orc, and became Afraid as a result. This didn't stop the PCs reaching the top of the stairs, where the characters could see a tunnel entrance (facing east; so entering it would be heading west); and they could see writing carved above the entrance, and on the southern (left) side of the entrance. Fea-bella tried to read that second piece of writing, but the Scholar test failed and so I sprang my twist: a group of Orcs was coming down a narrow way that continued upwards from the top of the stair - a narrow way that the PCs had not noticed - and was attacking the PCs, to drive them off.

The Orcs and PCs started out with equal dispositions - 9 hp each - but my cunning scripting, together with the Orcs' helmets and shields that let them absorb damage, and also the PCs inability to help one another properly (due to being Afraid), meant that the Orcs were victorious in this conflict: the PCs were, indeed, driven off. But I owed a significant compromise, as the Orcs had lost all but 3 hp by the end of the conflict, and so I agreed to the the player's suggestion that they were able to fall back into the tunnel. This did mean, though, that Fea-bella had to leave behind her half-moon glaive, of which she had been disarmed by the Orcs during the fight.

Not too far into the tunnel, in a slight alcove, the PCs found a pile of dried pine needles next to a pile of ash, with writing in yellow ochre. They had 5 camp checks at this point (four from breaking ties against themselves, and one from taking a -1D penalty) and so decided to camp, using the pine needles to start a fire. They also drank from their waterskins, to recover from Hunger and Thirst as the Grind clocked over.

The camp was quite successful: Fea-bella recovered from Angry and Afraid, and Golin recovered from Afraid (getting a free test from Fea-bella's Song of Serenity). Golin cooked up his forage (from last session) to ensure that his cousin Aldric was able to eat during the camp. He used his instinct to try and find more forage: Fea-bella aided with Herbs-wise and Fori helped with his Delving Nature; and Golin's player spent a Persona to channel Golin's own Delving Nature. The roll nevertheless failed, and so when Golin did find some forage hidden on a high rock shelf in the alcove, he and Fori had become Hungry and Thirsty. Golin therefore cooked again, using a portion of fresh rations, to enable them both to eat. Fea-bella was able to make an elixir that would lift the Angry condition for one turn (using Alchemist and her instinct), and the fifth camp check was spent to enable her to memorise spells. She stored Lightness of Being (= levitation) and Wizard's Aegis (= shield spell) in her dream palace.

So the PCs were once again free of conditions.

The PCs elected not to try and make sense of the ochre writing, thinking it was far too likely to just be a note from an Orc or Bugbear not to touch its stuff; and so they headed down the tunnel. This led them to the vault of the shrine proper: as I told the players, the vault is roughly circular, with the tunnel entering it on its east side. In its centre is a pool, with boulders lying in it. The ceiling is very high, and too dark to be seen, but with an opening visible at its top, through which they could see the red light of dawn. They couldn't properly judge the height, but it seemed clearly too high to drop a rope down. On the other (western) side of the pool, just illuminated by their candles, they could see a stone plinth.

They filled their waterskins from the pool, but made a point of not examining it closely; as a result (as I subsequently taunted them, near the end of the session) they did not find the 6D of gold coins at its bottom, nor the body of the mountain goat that had recently fallen into it (which would be two portions of game for cooking).

Rather, they moved on to the plinth, to see if anything was on it or written on it. On it was a box and two swords, and there was writing. They read this, with the Scholar test for Fea-bella succeeding, and I told them it was a fragment of poetry:

… and I passed beyond to journey 'mongst the planes
Sought death, found life and swords that shall ever bear my name

The Black, death black, be ever at my side
For fear of death I ever play death's game​

Sought law, found pain and swords for heroes' glory wrought

The White, pure white, you have your sting
Bitter experience has your lesson taught​

This quarrel's mortal wound shall see me breath my last breath
This night, in pain, shall see the end of Meryn Caradeth
I dwell on pain, for pain is …​

 

[clearstream]

This does not seem to comport with what as being said; as noted, the imagined world was allowed to not have precedence if genre convention would say otherwise, which...pretty much seems to fly in the face of everything you've just described here.

I don't understand your point here.

Does this mean any person can declare any game to be "simulationist" if they simply choose not to care about very many things? Because that seems to be the implication of this line of reasoning.

I believe that I have been consistent in contending that while a game's design will support doing some things over others, what game is played is only settled in play.

That means a person could take any RPG and see if they can do something identifiable as simulationism with it. Not caring about X won't necessarily procure Y, so the implication you draw seems wrong to me. They will have to care about some aspects of the imagined world.

 

[pemerton]

this doesn't seem like a kind of experience at least I would value very highly.

Terrific! I recommend, then, that you not play Burning Wheel or Apocalypse World.

 

[pemerton]

It’s the same for NPCs and PCs. The DM must establish the creature is trying to be stealthy and have it roll stealth. Then when combat is initiated there is no roll. If the creature wasn’t trying to be stealthy before combat began then no surprise. In both cases the roll was for stealth, ie no surprise roll.

If the GM rolls a random encounter, and decides to use some Orcs, and furthermore decides that they are sneaking up on the PCs to ambush them, then - as far as resolution is concerned - there is no "before combat began". The GM decides the Orcs are stealthy, makes the roll, refers to the PC passive perception ratings, and then proceeds accordingly.

 

[pemerton]

I think the key there is ‘for you’. Not for everyone.

I didn't speak for anyone else. I did edit to note that @hawkeyefan had a similar response to mine.

 

[pemerton]

Yes, and if it is possible to satisfy a desire for verisimilitude in the absence of what one identifies as "simulationism" that leaves open removing what one desires from that identity. However, that leaves only a narrow path, or none at all, between on the one hand rejecting creative agendas as telling us much about play and on the other hand a notion of games as tools. Surely some intention drives the woodcarver's hand?

Sure. I've spent a good chunk of the past N pages talking about this. It's about the process whereby the shared fiction is established. Part of that process includes the guides to, and constraints upon, decision-making.

In Burning Wheel, it is incumbent upon the GM to have regard to the relationships players have established for their PCs, when making decisions about what sorts of situations to present to the players. As the rulebook says, if a Vampyr is stalking the village, and one of the PCs has a wife as their relationship, than of course the GM has the Vampyr try and ensnare the PC's wife.

But in a mechanical simulation game, or some sorts of "dollhouse" game, the relevant principle would be the opposite: that in deciding what the Vampyr does, no regard should be paid to whether a particular NPC is in some "metagame" relationship to a player (eg noted as a relationship on that player's PC sheet).

It is these differences in principles, worked out through various appropriate techniques, that distinguish the creative agendas.

 

[clearstream]

I’m not following this at all.

If I believe that what games do is only settled in play, and play is intentional, how can it be right to discount the intentions players bring to play? Shouldn't I need to uphold the notion of creative agendas?

The "narrow path" is to suppose that players do bring intentions to play, but that they are more varied, mixed, and fluid than the GNS agendas represent. I have to discard GNS creative agendas because to paraphrase "games are not one thing or three things, they are many things."

Player intentions (let alone desires!) needn't (and don't) map neatly to the things games are liable to do (whether by design or otherwise.) And play itself may change them. Group dynamics might change them. Etcetera.

But this is not the only explanation, hence "or none at all." I see @pemerton's post above lays that out well. More than anything, my comment was questioning myself while pointing out that one could desire verisimilitude without committing to simulationism meaning that the desire itself can't be uniquely identified with simulationism.

EDITED

 

[pemerton]

You have made claims you know very well how sim play works. You have quoted extensive time playing Rolemaster and experience with 4ed to support this

Not 4e D&D. There is not a simulationist bone in the body of that RPG.

But Rolemaster 1000%. The only RPG I know that is more simulationist in some respects is RuneQuest. (I'm not sure about C&S, as I only know it from some pretty ordinary later editions.)

I think I know a thing or two of how to make the world feel alive and organic given the feedback I have gotten from players, though.

Great!

So the question I want to ask is: What kind of sim play do you have extensive experience and competence in?

What Eero Tuovinen calls "mechanical simulation", which Edwards calls "purist for system" simulation. I've also done a lot of setting building and prep, of the sort that was discussed earlier in this thread in the context of "sandbox" play. And have used that material to resolve situations and frame scenes in the context of RM play.

To highlight what I am talking about, consider the scenario I proposed previously: Alexander the great at the height of his military power is time traveled to 0AD Greece. Consider these two games:
1: The players are curious to find out how this scenario play out on a grand scale. Will the roman more evolved tactics obliterate the army? Would Alexander manage to use the leverage to position himself into some important political position? Which established political character of that age is most likely to have needed to concede power to Alexander in that case?
2: The players are curious to find out how this situation would feel from Alexander's viewpoint. How would he come to terms with finding the empire he built had fallen? How would his first meeting with a Roman emissary play out? Would he feel like he was among his own people when walking the streets of his home town?

Both of these games would from my understanding be very likely to give sim dominated play according to GNS from my understanding. But I think it would be clear to everyone that can think for themselves that these two experiences are wildly different, and that focus on one set of questions by necessity would steal time from focusing on the other set of questions.

What you appear to describe is that active framing can be a effective tool for the second kind of game. I completely agree. And if you manage to clarify that this is all you have meant to say all along, I think this is indeed very uncontroversial. However the way you have formulated yourself has made it very easy to interpret your claim as being that the techniques you have proposed are useful for all kinds of sim, including the first example. I think this is where the push back is coming from, as that is at least far from obvious to me.

I don't think active scene framing is very useful for any "simulationist" play, including your second example. But @Campbell will have more insight into this than me, as he is very experienced in "social crawls" which your example looks like it might be? (I'm not sure: is a player playing Alexander? Or is he a prominent NPC?)

 

[Enrahim]

I don't recall 2 am being a feature of the example set out in the blog:
<snip>

Ok, another case of people talking about completely different things. The example in the blog was the seed for the discussion, but over the course of some dozens of posts people looked at all possible kinds of interpretations of the situation. The conclusion was that most interpretations of the situation was fine, but that there was one very specific interpretation/context where there was significant controversy. This is the example everyone now refers to as problematic, and that example involve 2am as one of several other context details added to the blog seed.

Of course they can. I've seen it happen in real life.

Touche. I was to unprecise in defining what "this choice" was supposed to refer to. It was meant to refer to the choice of allowing the failed pick lock roll to succeed the task, but introduce a complication in a way that doesn't make sense. Narrating things that doesn't make sense of course happens all the time.

It doesn't have to be done in a couple of seconds. Nothing prevents the GM thinking. A common technique is to shift the action at the cliff-hanger moment to another character, precisely to give some time for the cliff-hanger situation to sit there for a bit and generate ideas.

This is great advice of how to implement the technique in practice! This particular trick doesn't harmonize very well with party based play though.. (Not that that is a particular issue in BW of course!)

Not to mention: in a game that is using "fail forward" resolution, the GM will typically (if they are following the game rules and heuristics) have already established a trajectory of threats and possibilities, which - as John Harper explains here - are what the GM then draws on to bring home an adverse consequence.

It can take a while to get good at this. Eero Tuovinen wrote about this here:

The player’s task in these games is simple advocacy, which is not difficult once you have a firm character. (Chargen is a key consideration in these games, compare them to see how different approaches work.) The GM might have more difficulty, as he needs to be able to reference the backstory, determine complications to introduce into the game, and figure out consequences. Much of the rules systems in these games address these challenges, and in addition the GM might have methodical tools outside the rules, such as pre-prepared relationship maps (helps with backstory), bangs (helps with provoking thematic choice) and pure experience (helps with determining consequences).​

Ultimately, a GM who isn't good at this sort of thing will not be able to GM a "fail forward" game well. This would be similar to how I'm not a very good GM of classic dungeon crawls, because I lack the necessary patience.

Yes, I think this also provides important context to when fail forward is useful as a technique. It cannot just be jerry rigged on top of a D&D living world sandbox. I know you haven't been advocating that, but a lot of the resistance to FF in this thread is that there have been people that indeed (apparently) have suggested such might be a good idea.

Which example are you talking about? Not the one from the blog, which says nothing about what would have been narrated on a success, nor anything about whether the NPC is previously established, nor anything about the cook being in the middle of some activity. In fact, to me the example seems to take it as obvious that the cook is implicit in the established situation.

Yes, this is another of the context conditions added to the seed to make the problematic example.

But anyway, setting aside the example in the blog and turning to the example you are focused on, you are positing that the GM has made the following decision: if the roll succeeds, I narrate an empty kitchen; if the roll fails, I narrate a kitchen with a startled cook in the midst of making scones. Obviously, this is not a GM using map-and-key adjudication, nor using a heuristic that seeks to model one.

This is precisely the GM deciding that they will frame one scene on a success, and a different one on a failure. You may not care for it, but it is clearly a decision about what scene to frame: on a success, the GM chooses to frame a scene in which no cook is present.

Here's an analogue from actual play, that I posted somewhere upthread in the past few days:
I described the weird marks on the wall, but I did not, and did not need to, think about what they might mean. That was resolved by the player declaring an action to read them, to see if his (and his PC's hope) that they might show a way out was correct. The roll succeeded, and thus (in the fiction) the PC correctly deciphered the clue in the carvings about how to get out of the dungeon and (at the table, in mechanical terms) the complication Lost in the Dungeon was eliminated.

What this example, and the cook example I describe just above, take advantage of is that human beings have the ability to create interesting fiction spontaneously. Including about who is in the kitchen or what the strange runes say. And it is possible to build a game in which the fiction that gets created is shaped by its creator in ways that fulfil, or dash, the hopes other participants in the game have for what the fiction will be. And it is possible to build a game, like the one described in the previous sentence, where the participant's hope is personified, in the fiction, as the hope of a particular character who finds themself in the imagined situation, in respect of which the hopes for how it will work out are arising. And where the determination as to whether they win or lose, in respect of this hope, is determined by rolling dice.

The game I've just worked out in the previous paragraph will be a RPG. It will have some similarities to other RPGs, and some differences. It may draw on prep to a great degree, a modest degree, or (as my Cortex+ Heroic Fantasy hack did) almost no prep at all. The way any prep is drawn on to shape narration can be quite different too, from RPG to RPG.

If you assume that questions of who is in the kitchen or what the runes say, by their nature, should be answered in prep (or by an improv GM making a decision that emulates the function of prep), then of course you will reject some RPGing that makes different assumptions about what should be, or needs to be, prepped. But there is no normative basis I can see for the assumption that any sort of fiction should be prepped. Different games do this differently. In the past 10 years I've GMed a dozen or more different RPGs, nearly all of which take different approaches to prep. In my Torchbearer 2e game, strange runes were handled completely differently, because the game assumes a higher degree of prep-based GM authority over backstory:

Yes. Different games does it differently. Someone appear to have said something that was interpreted as a claim people running living world sandboxes avoided FF based on not understanding it, and closed minded conservatism. This appear to be what has fueled quite a bit of this thread. The quote make it seem you have missed this context. In particular "But there is no normative basis I can see for the assumption that any sort of fiction should be prepped." In RPGing in general there isn't. In a game where the GM sells in their game as one that has an extensive prepped fiction to explore and interact with, then there is a normative basis that the fiction should be prepped (That normative basis would be that otherwise the GM would be selling the players a lie in case that wasn't obvious)